ducky 0.9 (pre)

i've put together a tool called 'ducky'. inspired by the tool yubnub, described as "the realization of a
very big idea: the URL command line of the web OS" (via joe quino's blog entry describing it). instead, ducky
is designed to be my CLI to the web.

the basic idea behind ducky isn't terribly new, in fact it uses a number
of web service libraries: mark pikgrim's pyGoogle, pyAmazon, and a host
of other things like pyYahoo, and pyTechnorati, and some code i cribbed
from the pyFeedster code to get searches in a bunch of other engines
working. what is new is that it's one tool, not a dozen, and it all
operates in much the same way.

i basically don't like having to call a bunch of tools just to get a
simple question answered (ie "what is EVDO?"), or even change my workspace
(from iTerm to Firefox) to do the same. i'm sorta lazy, but i like to
think i'm more efficient.

some years ago i wrote a small tool, cligoogle, that
did much the same. google some terms, get back some answers. had a
few neat features, but was fragile since i scraped HTML. now i just use
XML or a web service if it's present, a lot less fragile.

so, why use a single tool? well, basically, i worry that
the promise of web services is buried beneath a big annoyance, namely
dealing with
a lot of overhead. who wants to write a lot of XML, or write to
different APIs, just to do the same thing on different sites? not i, and
i bet not you.

so, let's hear it for the command line, one of my favorite places to be.
i can easily access my command line from almost anywhere in the world i
can get SSH access, i can't always access my browser/laptop. i can work
more quickly without worrying about page loads. and i can script it more
readily.